What is Pubky?

01 August What is Pubky?

We had the opportunity to speak with John Carvalho, the company’s CEO behind Pubky, a new distributed web protocol and social platform currently under beta testing. Pubky offers a fundamental new take on decentralized web and decentralized social media. This has been pioneered through previous efforts such as ActivityPub, Ostatus, Protocol, and Nostr. The Pabky protocol is designed from the ground up for user sovereignty, data ownership and censorship resistance.

Synonym pubky: Decentralized social media was done correctly

Synonym CEO John Carvalho has disrupted some feathers with Nostr, a decentralized social media protocol with Lightning Network integration, which is embraced by the Bitcoin community. Nostr’s John’s criticism coincides with the recent launch of Pubky’s beta app, which was announced last month at BTC Prague, and John considers it a “strict upgrade” to Nostr. Naturally, John’s post has earned considerable replies from the Nostrol community. Some responded with curiosity, while others criticized Nostol’s criticism as a personal attack. John was kind enough to expand his original comments in an exclusive interview with Bitfinex.

So, what exactly is Pubky?

The synonym Pabky project aims to rebuild the web around user sovereignty by replacing accounts with encrypted public keys. Instead of relying on the platform to host identity and data, Pubky uses distributed tools such as PKARR, Mainline DHT, and Homeservers to allow users to directly own and control their digital presence. Everything from content to identity is portable and signed and verifiable.

One of Pubky’s most important features is the Public Key Domain (PKDS), an alternative to DNS censorship resistance. Your domain linked to your key resides in a hardened DHT with redundancy and signed records, making takedowns almost impossible. If the server is prohibited, simply move it and your identity and data will move as is.

An interview with John Carvalho from Pubky vs. Nostr

Last week we were able to catch up with John Carvalho, the guy behind Pubky, and get an idea of why Pubky thinks Nostr is a great protocol, filling the gap that appears to exist in Nostr’s protocol design.

1. What are the main complaints or complaints you have in NOSTR, please give an overview for those who have not had the opportunity to read your NOSTR post

JC: I recently decided to use a lot of Nostr. I wanted to be certain before criticizing it on a technical level. What I found was a broken app, a broken search, missing posts, unchanged settings, and an overall Yankee experience.

This did not surprise me as I would expect these issues when applying the designs Nostr has.

My central complaint is that the protocol design is flawed, leading to both the broken user experience I mentioned and the massive censorship.

2. Why do you think Nostr is censorable?

JC: Nostr and Pubky are similar to all the web technologies that we already had. If you want to gather many people in one place, such as social media, marketplaces, etc., you need another person’s server to provide your data.

Both protocols use public key encryption to establish a user’s identity, but that’s where the similarities end.

Nostr will require many computers to host their data for free, but at large, they will require paid services, just like current cloud providers. The problem means that once you reach that scale and are censored by the server, NoStr lacks what is called a “discovery method”. This means that you are not sure where the data is or which data is correct.

3. Why do you think discoverability is so important? How does Pubky do this and how does it compare to Nostr’s approach?

JC:Pubky resolves this by using a public key as the domain name instead of using a censorable ICANN domain name and DNS. This is called PKDNS.

The public key domain is located in the mainline DHT, the most distributed network on the planet. Here, millions of nodes can help you find the current location of your data at any time.

4. I mentioned that anyone running the Nostr relay could be legally liable for not being complied with. Why does someone face legal problems to run the relay from your perspective?

Hosting services and social media content are regulated in most countries. At the very least, it aims to comply with laws related to CSAM, copyright, harassment, etc. Small enthusiast relays may stay under the radar, but anyone trying to build a business on this should face fines and prisons. You don’t want to catch them in the middle of an investigation while hosting illegal, scary content. “I didn’t know” is not an excuse for them to accept.

5. How do Pubky Shield users do from this legal risk?

JC: There is nothing to protect users from legal risks other than following the law. What Pubky does is give people a reliable exit when they are censored. They can pick up where they left off without interruption, as long as they can find a new host or are willing to host themselves.

6. Outline how running NOSTR relay vs. running Pubky Homeserver and how both experiences are similar and different.

JC: Most people don’t run relays on Nostr, but most people run home servers on Pubky.

Simply put, relays are intended to act as a pool of servers that may or may not have the data you are looking for.

Pubky Homeservers is a single source of truth for your data. The Homeserver data is then reproduced by another role called Indencers. It aggregates all your Pubky data into a graph database that can provide excellent UX using your application.

7. How does Pubky differ from decentralized social media protocols such as Hive, Bastyon, Farcaster, The Fediverse, and Bluesky?

JC: To be honest, I don’t know much about most of them! I think the most relevant project to this conversation is Bluesky. There is also a server model, but it doesn’t have the PKDNS aspect.

8. Explain the humor behind Nip 177

JC: Haha, well, that’s my BIP 177 riff and aims to improve the terminology of Bitcoin and how the amount is displayed. The joke is that some people say it very differently from “nostol”! Some say “Northur,” others say “Northur.” Well, I think I made a joke suggestion on how to say it correctly.

9.How can people get Pubky?

JC: Our flagship application, Pubky.App, is currently in beta. You can follow @getPubky on X and request an invitation code there. It should be out of beta by the end of the year.

All protocols and software are all open source at github.com/pubky/

10. How does Pubky fit with other synonymous products?

JC: Pubky is a major part of the entire “atomic economy” vision, which aims to provide the world’s first functional and sustainable free market society.

This includes BitKit, BlockTank, PayKit, and Atomicity, but we can talk about them next time!